““No it doesn’t. It makes them dead and us alive.”

In WWII we did not arrive at the idea of the destruction of entire cities as a key to victory on 8 Dec 1941. Right up to the end, the USAAF was convinced that precision bombing was the way to go, not the area bombing the Germans and the RAF came up with early in the war.

Instead, years of fighting across the Pacific and one Japanese atrocity after another taught us who we were fighting. The Kamikazes and mass suicides were the final lesson.

A book I recently read describes how the men of a P-38 unit considered the Japanese a worthy enemy to be fought – until on New Guinea when they found a site where the “comfort women” had been slaughtered rather than let them be captured by the Americans. After that the Japanese became an enemy to be exterminated. Lining up fighters wingtip to wingtip in waves to drop tanks of napalm on Japanese troops was a pleasure.

I think that by now we should have learned the lesson the Taliban and other Islamic Fascists have been trying so hard to teach us.